It takes its time getting there, but you know The Hate U Give is going to turn serious on us because it starts with our narrator, 16-year-old Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg), telling us about the time when she was 9 and her dad gave her The Talk -- not the sex talk, but the one black parents give...

See, they're a couple of brothers whose last name is Sisters. "The Sisters brothers." Get it? As a novel, much of what made The Sisters Brothers so entertaining was author Patrick DeWitt's amusingly dry way with words, his knack for turning a phrase. You're bound to lose some of that with any film...

In the parlance of rock-climbers, to "free solo" means to climb alone and without a rope -- basically, to remove all margin for error. If you make a mistake, you die. What you must keep reminding yourself while watching the documentary Free Solo -- about a man training to ascend one of the world's...

An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn is Jim Hosking's followup to his infamously irritating/amusing The Greasy Strangler, which I enjoyed as a you-gotta-see-this provocation. I was curious to see what else Hosking could do, but it seems Greasy Strangler represented the sum of his skills and...

The Guilty is a tight, efficient, 85 minutes set in a single location: the 911 call center in Copenhagen. (Except it’s not 911 over there, it’s 112. What a country!) Police officer Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) is on temporary desk duty taking emergency calls — this is evidently how the Danes...

Lee Israel was a journalist who made a living writing well-regarded biographies before falling on hard times after the failure of her unauthorized 1985 Estee Lauder book, which Lauder undermined by preemptively releasing an autobiography. The excellent Can You Forgive Me?, based on Israel's own...

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or MOTCOJCOLDS for short) know Emma Hale Smith, wife of the Prophet Joseph Smith, as a loving spouse who put up with a lot of garbage. Long before her husband was murdered in 1844, she endured the deaths of some of her children, was forced...

The 2018 Halloween is a direct sequel to the 1978 Halloween, and it exists in a timeline where there were never any other sequels, not even the one that erased the other ones. Michael Myers killed four people that night (that's not counting his sister Judith 15 years earlier) and was evidently...

(Full disclosure: The director of this film is the wife of a friend of mine, who is one of the producers. You shouldn't listen to anything I say about this or any other movie.) Louisa May Alcott's beloved Little Women gets an update in this affectionate adaptation set in the present day....

The first Goosebumps movie wasn't an adaptation of one of R.L. Stine's tween-horror books but a story about the Goosebumps books, in which Stine (played by Jack Black) had the power to bring his scary imaginings to life merely by writing them. With that established, the sequel doesn't need Stine...

Ryan Gosling is a handsome man, but it's his profile that's most aesthetically pleasing. We saw a lot of it in Drive, where he sat behind the wheel of a car and was was often photographed from the passenger seat, and we see it again in First Man, where he's a test pilot in a cockpit. The pilot,...

Drew Goddard wrote for TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lost before he started making movies, and it shows. His first film as writer/director, The Cabin in the Woods, had a Buffy-like self-awareness and deconstructionist attitude, and his second -- the pulpy neo-noir Bad Times at the El...

As a very funny gay person who never has enough money, I am the target audience for an Oscar Wilde biopic. But despite Rupert Everett's passion as writer, director, and star -- this is clearly the movie he was born to make -- The Happy Prince is a lugubrious slog. It begins after Wilde has spent...

(Streaming on Shudder.) Buenos Aires is rife with supernatural activity in Demian Rugna's Terrified (Aterrados), much of it centralized to a particular street (perhaps because of zoning?). The manifestations are frequently chilling, as when a man who hears a recurring "thump" sound investigates...

Because of her outlandish costumery and made-up name, it's easy to dismiss Lady Gaga as a gimmicky pop star. What we discover in the sturdy, old-fashioned A Star Is Born (if we hadn't already) is that she has a strong, beautiful singing voice and a natural presence as an actor. Her co-star,...